American - Politician | April 9, 1905 - February 9, 1995
The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends.
J. William Fulbright
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The junior senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatreds and prejudices of the American people that he has started a prairie fire which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.
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The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.
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I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant.
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The exchange program is the thing that reconciles me to all the difficulties of political life.
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In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.
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There has been a strong tradition in this country that it is not the function of the military to educate the public on political issues.
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The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.
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I think we Americans tend to put too high a price on unanimity, as if there were something dangerous and illegitimate about honest differences of opinion honestly expressed by honest men.
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What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.
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We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders.
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There is an inevitable divergence between the world as it is and the world as men perceive it.
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